Household Businesstraces the genre's origins in the cycle plays of medieval England and examines its aesthetic configurations in relation to extra-literary discourses and practices that underwrote ...Renaissance ideologies of private life.
The sixteenth-century adaptations of the Griselda legend combine a number of features that are central to the domestic play; these include the trials of the patient wife, the theme of romantic love ...in marriage, and the tension between private life and public authority.¹ Among the extant sixteenth-century versions, Phillip’s hybrid morality,² the ballad ‘Of Patient Grissel,’ and the 1599Patient Grissilby Dekker, Chettle, and Haughton retain only marginally the symbolic structures of their medieval analogues. Rather than allegorizing the afflicted soul’s progression towards virtue, Griselda’s trials assume a broader social and political significance. The new emphasis is introduced by
Domestic drama has its roots in the literary and cultural traditions of the Middle Ages. While the development of the genre out of the morality play has been widely observed, it is also indebted to ...other medieval dramatic forms. The oldest analogue of the domestic murder play is ‘Dux Moraud,’ fragment of a fourteenth-century English play. The subject is the story of Apollonius of Tyre and his daughter, a victim of paternal incest. After murdering her mother and daughter at the behest of Apollonius, she murders her father for later abandoning her. Journeying to a foreign land, she continues her
An important juncture in the evolution of domestic drama is the emergence of plays dealing with the effects of witchcraft on English communities and, more specifically, on English households.¹ The ...two extant examples of domestic witch plays are both tragicomedies: Dekker, Ford and Rowley’sThe Witch of Edmonton(1621) and Heywood and Brome’sThe Late Lancashire Witches(1634). In subject matter these texts share the domestic murder plays’ interest in contemporary reportage and the cult of domesticity. The last of the surviving murder plays,The Witch of Edmonton, stages a recent contemporary event, namely the execution of Elizabeth Sawyer for
Between 1600 and 1608 five comedies performed in the public theatres reconstruct the Tudor Prodigal Son plots by focusing on the fall and redemption of profligate husbands and the trials of the ...patient wife. These comedies also retain the superstructure of domestic tragedy. Alfred Harbage has observed that ‘the “homiletic tragedies” in which adultery leads to disaster are overwhelmed ... by what might be called, with equal justice, the “homiletic comedies” where a woman’s constancy saves the day.’¹How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad(generally attributed to Thomas Heywood),²The Fair Maid of Bristow, The
Domestic tragedy flourished during a time when early modern England was undergoing a severe crisis of order. The 1599Patient Grissil, we have seen, speaks to the tensions that contradicted the ...dominant view of the well-regulated family sustained by companionate marriage. ‘Marital disharmony and unhappiness,’ writes Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘were very widespread according to contemporary observers, indeed commoner than mutual affection or contentment in the view of some.’¹ Disorder in the family was also evinced by numerous case histories of adultery and bigamy; the rise in the number of illegitimate children, which reached a peak between 1590 and 1610; the increasing
The domestic play flourished on the English popular stage during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its roots were predominantly native, rather than classical, and its mainspring was ...the staging of domestic conflict amongst English characters from the middle ranks of society. 'Household Business' traces the genre's origins in the cycle plays of medieval England and examines its aesthetic configurations in relation to extra-literary discourses and practices that underwrote Renaissance ideologies of private life. At a time when the orthodox view of the family defined it as the foundation of the social order, a number of domestic dramas took a more critical perspective, stressing the contradictions and struggles that attend marriage and the patriarchal family.
In addition to well-known domestic dramas as A Woman Killed with Kindness , Arden of Feversham , The Witch of Edmonton , and A Yorkshire Tragedy , Viviana Comensoli analyzes less well-studied plays as A Warning for Fair Women , Two Lamentable Tragedies , and The Late Lancashire Witches . The book also provides an extensive and timely assessment of domestic comedy, demonstrating how plays such as The London Prodigal , The Fair Maid of Bristow , and The Honest Whore (Parts I and II) resist homiletic paradigms in favour of a more dialectical dramaturgy.
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